Last Night at the Telegraph Club

by Malinda Lo

  Meanwhile, the war provided an additional route to citizenship for Chinese immigrants: the military. Previously, due to Exclusion, many Chinese Americans arrived under false pretenses. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed thousands of public documents, Chinese began to arrive with false documentation claiming that they were the children of American citizens of Chinese descent. These immigrants became known as “paper sons.” When the United States entered World War II, approximately one-third of all Chinese American men between ages fifteen and sixty enlisted, in comparison with about 11 percent of the general population. Military service is not traditionally valued in Chinese culture, but perhaps one reason so many Chinese American men enlisted was because it enabled them to become naturalized American citizens, regardless of their previous immigration history.

  After the war, quotas for Chinese immigrants loosened, first allowing veterans (including Chinese American veterans) to bring their wives to the United States, then extending that right to non-veteran Chinese Americans. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act allowed the naturalization of family members of American citizens, which enabled many Chinese families to reunify in the States. By the early 1950s, San Francisco’s Chinatown had developed two distinct but overlapping populations: the aging group of bachelors who’d immigrated before the war, and a growing community of families based in the merchant class. Shirley Lum is rooted in this part of Chinatown, and her aspirations to compete in the Miss Chinatown pageant echo the broader goals of Chinatown’s business community.

  Due to longstanding racist beliefs that Asians could not be true Americans, which were drawn into sharp focus first by Japanese internment and then by McCarthyism, Chinatown’s leaders aimed to blunt white fears of the “other” by engaging in a quintessentially American cultural practice: the beauty pageant. Chinatown girls were selected to represent their community as models of American womanhood, spiced up with a little carefully cultivated exotic flair in the form of their dress, the cheongsam. The Miss Chinatown contest was originally held over the Fourth of July, making clear the patriotic connection, but by 1953, the beauty pageant had moved to coincide with the Chinese New Year festival. The festival and the Miss Chinatown contest were part of a broader effort to convince white Americans that Chinese Americans could assimilate and become model citizens—model minorities.

  Combating racism through fitting in has never entirely worked. In 1956, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began the Chinese Confession Program, which promised forgiveness if an immigrant revealed their fraudulent “paper son” documents. However, if one confessed, that would implicate by extension their family, and sometimes the information revealed was used to deport suspected Communist sympathizers. In fact, the Confession Program snared members of the leftist youth group that Lily encounters, and ultimately revoked the citizenship of at least two of its members.

  Lily’s family represents a category of Chinese immigrant rarely depicted in popular culture and is inspired by my own family’s experience. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, sons (and a few daughters) from upper class families in China sometimes came to the United States to study at American universities. The Chinese students who came to the States to study were not subject to the same immigration restrictions as laborers because of their class privilege, and they generally returned to China after completing their education. Some of them came from wealthy families; others were funded by scholarships. Many of them learned English in missionary schools in China. Although these students faced racism like all Chinese immigrants, their privileges smoothed their passage to America.

  From 1937 to 1945, the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, both fought on the ground in China, limited the number of Chinese students in America, but after World War II, thousands more came in search of a modern education that they could use to rebuild their devastated homeland. However, the Chinese Civil War, fought from 1946 to 1949 between Chiang’s Nationalist Party and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party, got in the way. When Mao triumphed and the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, those Chinese students were stranded in the United States, which did not recognize the Communist government until 1972. Many Chinese students were able to be naturalized, especially after the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, but a few were deported—notably, Dr. Hsue-shen Tsien.

  My paternal grandfather, John Chuan-fang Lo, came to the U.S. in 1933 to earn his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago. While there, he met my paternal grandmother, Ruth Earnshaw, who was white. After he graduated, he returned to China to teach at Huachung College. He and Ruth were married on August 5, 1937, in Shanghai, days before Japan invaded. They spent the rest of the Sino-Japanese War and part of World War II as refugees in western China near the Burma Road. In 1944, my grandmother was evacuated with the help of the U.S. military, but my grandfather remained in China until 1946, when he obtained a temporary teaching job at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He soon realized that he was being paid less than his white colleagues, and due to health care issues, the family needed additional income. Thus, the entire family went back to China in 1947, and were not able to leave until 1978, after I was born.

  My grandparents didn’t know that the Communists would take over China. I have often wondered if they would have tried to stay in the States if they had known. Lily’s family, although different from mine, was loosely inspired by this question.

  LESBIANS, GENDER, AND COMMUNITY

  In the 1950s, the concept of same-sex marriage was largely inconceivable; interracial marriage wouldn’t even be legalized across the United States until 1967. Homosexuality was categorized as a psychological disorder until 1987, and laws against homosexual sex only began to be repealed in 1962. These legal restrictions didn’t mean that gay people did not exist, but being gay was not culturally acceptable, and that meant the gay and lesbian community was largely underground and had its own coded language.

  Within San Francisco’s white lesbian community in the 1940s and ’50s, women used terms such as butch and femme in ways that could indicate gender expression and sexual preferences. At this time, gender was perceived as a predominantly binary concept. Although people certainly crossed gender boundaries and existed between them, the terminology available to Lily’s community was black or white: men or women, butch or femme. Butches were lesbians with masculine appearances; femmes were traditionally feminine; and butches usually had relationships with femmes. “Butch/femme” has sometimes been misunderstood as an imitation of heterosexuality, but in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis explain: “Butches defied convention by usurping male privilege in appearance and sexuality, and with their fems, outraged society by creating a romantic and sexual unit within which women were not under male control. . . . Butch-fem roles were the key structure for organizing against heterosexual dominance.”

  Expressing a butch identity involved cultivating a masculine appearance, which could involve wearing men’s clothing. Many cities outlawed cross-dressing in public; San Francisco’s law was not repealed until 1974. As lesbian Reba Hudson relates in Wide-Open Town, gay men and lesbians were often harassed by police for cross-dressing in the 1940s and ’50s, but women who cross-dressed would wear women’s underwear, because then “they couldn’t book you for impersonating a person of the opposite sex.”

  Cross-gender impersonation was all right, however, onstage. Male and female impersonation had long been part of theater, and it differed from what we today call drag. Impersonation was not queer-coded in its early days and was usually performed by heterosexuals. By the 1920s, however, mainstream male impersonation fell out of vogue, possibly due to changing ideas about sexuality that linked cross-gender performance with homosexuality. Male impersonation did not end, though; it continued and transformed in marginalized spaces. In 1920s and ’30s Harlem, African American singer Gladys Bentley performed
in menswear, and at the time she didn’t hide her queer identity. When her Harlem career began to fizzle in the 1940s, Bentley went west, eventually landing at Mona’s, the lesbian nightclub in San Francisco. Mona’s featured other male impersonators who, like Bentley, dressed in tuxedos and often replaced standard lyrics in their songs with openly gay ones. Clubs featuring male impersonators continued to advertise in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications well into the 1950s, and heterosexual tourists went to the shows seeking exotic entertainment, just as they visited Chinatown for a taste of the Orient.

  The early 1950s was a period of relative freedom for San Francisco gay bars, because the 1951 Stoumen v. Reilly decision legalized public assembly of homosexuals in California. Homosexual acts, however, remained illegal, and as the decade wore on, police crackdowns would start to focus on homosexual activity. In September 1954, police raided 12 Adler, a bar owned by butch lesbian Tommy Vasu. Several teenage girls were also arrested, and newspaper accounts played up a scandalous cocktail of drugs, homosexuality, and cross-dressing. In 1956, a new mayor launched an anti-vice campaign to put many gay bars out of business. It’s no coincidence that 1956 was also the year that the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded; this early gay rights organization aimed to provide a way for lesbians to socialize outside the bar scene.

  The DOB and the lesbian bars described in Wide-Open Town seemed to be predominantly white. It has been difficult for me to find evidence of lesbians of color in this time period, although Kennedy’s and Davis’s research does include black women. Finding any history of queer Asian American women has been even more difficult, but tantalizing clues have surfaced in many sources. Wide-Open Town, of course, mentions Merle Woo, who was an Asian American activist in the 1970s and ’80s, and it also mentions the existence of Filipina lesbians. Incidentally, a Filipina lesbian named Rose was the originator of the idea for the DOB, though the DOB’s white cofounders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, have become far better known. Arthur Dong’s Forbidden City, USA, a documentary and accompanying book about the Chinatown nightclub, includes gay Asian American performers, but they don’t speak about their experiences in detail. The Chinese lesbian that Lily’s father mentions was inspired by Margaret Chung, who was the first Chinese American woman doctor and was rumored to be a lesbian who had a relationship with singer Sophie Tucker. Chung never came out. Historian Amy Sueyoshi put me in touch with Crystal Jang, a Chinese American lesbian who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and went to Galileo High School in the late 1950s and ’60s. I also spoke with Kitty Tsui, a lesbian poet who was active in the 1970s and ’80s with Merle Woo. Tsui and Jang both told me that they were often the sole Asian American lesbian in the room.

  Lily’s story is my attempt to draw some of this history out from the margins, to un-erase the stories of women like Crystal Jang and Merle Woo and Dr. Margaret Chung. Lily’s story is entirely fiction and is not based on theirs, but I imagine that she and these real women all had to deal with similar challenges: learning how to live as both Chinese American and lesbian, in spaces that often did not allow both to coexist.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  In addition to periodicals from the 1950s including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and Seventeen magazine, some of the most useful references I consulted include:

  BOOKS AND ARTICLES

  Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

  Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America. New York: Viking, 2003.

  Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity: 20th Anniversary Edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

  Holt, Nathalia. Rise of the Rocket Girls. New York: Little, Brown, 2016.

  Kao, George. Cathay by the Bay: Glimpses of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the Year 1950. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988.

  Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

  Lim, Shirley Jennifer. A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930–1960. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

  Moy, Victoria. Fighting for the Dream: Voices of Chinese American Veterans From World War II to Afghanistan. Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 2014.

  Nee, Victor G., and Brett de Bary. Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

  Ni, Ting. The Cultural Experiences of Chinese Students Who Studied in the United States During the 1930s–1940s. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.

  Rodger, Gillian. Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.

  Sueyoshi, Amy. “Breathing Fire: Remembering Asian Pacific American Activism in Queer History.” In LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2016.

  Wong, Edmund S. Growing Up in San Francisco’s Chinatown: Boomer Memories From Noodle Rolls to Apple Pie. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2018.

  Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

  Yeh, Chiou-Ling. Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

  Zhao, Xiaojian. Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

  DOCUMENTARY FILMS

  Chen, Amy, and Ying Zhan. Chinatown Files. Filmakers Library, 2001.

  DeLarverié, Stormé, and Michelle Parkerson, et al. Stormé: the Lady of the Jewel Box. Women Make Movies, 2000.

  Dong, Arthur E. et al. Forbidden City, U.S.A. DeepFocus Productions, 2015.

  Poirier, Paris. Last Call At Maud’s. Frameline, 1993.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without the hard work and support of so many wonderful people. I will always be grateful to my friend and fellow author Saundra Mitchell, who first gave me the opportunity to imagine Lily’s story when she invited me to contribute a short story to her anthology All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages. I thought that story, “New Year,” was the end of it—until my prescient agent, Michael Bourret, persuaded me that it could become a novel. (It only took me three years!) My editor, Andrew Karre, gave me invaluable guidance in transforming that story into this novel, and inspired me to think outside the boundaries of what I perceive to be young adult fiction.

  Thank you to my parents, Kirk and Margaret Lo, and my aunt, Catherine Lo, who provided invaluable assistance in writing the book’s Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue. Thank you to Amy Sueyoshi, Crystal Jang, and Kitty Tsui for sharing their advice and personal experience when I was researching this book. Thank you to emily m. danforth, Britta Lundin, Cindy Pon, and Betty Law, who read early drafts and offered honest feedback and encouragement. I’m completely in love with the beautiful cover illustration by Feifei Ruan, who brought Lily and Kath’s San Francisco to life in such a magical way.

  Thank you to Julie Strauss-Gabel and the entire team at Dutton and Penguin: designer Kristin Boyle; copy editor Anne Heausler; publicist Kaitlin Kneafsey; Carmela Iaria, Venessa Carson, Summer Ogata, Rachel Wease and the whole school and library team. As an author, I don’t know the names of everyone who takes part in making my book into a real thing that readers can hold in their hands, but please know that I think of all of you during the long process—everyone from production to sales—and I thank you for the work that you do.

  Last but not least, thank you to my wife, Amy Lovell, who supported me throughout the entire journey: my first reader, my cheerleader, my love.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Malinda Lo
is the critically acclaimed author of several young adult novels, including most recently A Line in the Dark, which was a Kirkus Best YA Book of 2017 and one of Vulture's 10 Best YA Books of 2017. Her novel Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and was a Kirkus Best Book for Children and Teens. She has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Malinda's nonfiction has been published by the New York Times Book Review, NPR, the Huffington Post, The Toast, the Horn Book, and the anthologies Here We Are, How I Resist, and Scratch. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife.

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  * Foreign devils; derogatory.

  * Barbecue pork.